I call shenanigans. The FCC demands paid peering contract details, for the stated goal of providing "transparency" and "answers" to the U.S. public ... but when Ars sends an FOIA request, it's all "hey, this is confidential stuff, we can't release it" ...
How much you wanna bet someone at the FCC has close friends at L3, Comcast, or even the entities involved in these deals? And somehow these secrets will find their way into their hands ...
Nah, a government agency would never share your valuable secrets with your competitors / enemies. Oh, wait.
That kind of sharing doesn't even have to be explicit. Once this information is in the FCC's hands (and who does that mean exactly? Wheeler? Wheeler's assistant? His gold buddies? His wife? Last I checked the FCC is not full of spies with top-secret clearance, but rather a bunch of ex-telecom execs), it will slip into the hands of the big companies without anyone even revealing it intentionally. Just by knowing the data, people at the FCC will slip up in conversation with cable execs, accidentally saying just enough to imply the details of a peering deal. e.g. "That's all Netflix is offering you for that level of peering? I'm surprised, seems much less than average." A sentence like that is all it would take for a Verizon exec to infer that Comcast is getting a better peering deal from Netflix than him.
All that said, personally I don't see why these deals shouldn't be open. If you ask me, peering should work the same as ad-serving. That is, there should be an open marketplace for BGP routes where companies can submit real time bids to each other. Anyone with sufficient routing, whether Netflix or a small startup, should be able to participate in the market. Let supply and demand determine the deals.
"Do you think we get a worst deal than somebody like Comcast?" "Now, one might very well think that... but I couldn't possibly comment" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz8RjPAD2Jk
Or, put another way, allow companies other than ISPs and massive content distributors to build scalable networks by negotiating bandwidth at a fair rate, instead of absurd prices like $0.10 per gigabyte transferred.
Why should documentation handed over to the Feds be subject to a FOIA? It is still private information of the individuals submitting it. As in, its not the government's to disclose.
Honestly if that is all it took to lose your rights to privacy people would be up in arms. The FOIA should be able to tell you who they are requesting information from and what type, it should not necessarily make that information public. I do think that if it results in criminal prosecution it can be revealed after all court cases have been resolved.
More specifically, there's a FOIA exemption for this very situation. It's exemption 4, the business/financial secret exemption.
A quote from justice.gov's FOIA guide[1]:
Exemption 4 of the FOIA protects "trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person [that is] privileged or confidential." (1) This exemption is intended to protect the interests of both the government and submitters of information. Its very existence encourages submitters to voluntarily furnish useful commercial or financial information to the government and it correspondingly provides the government with an assurance that such information will be reliable. The exemption also affords protection to those submitters who are required to furnish commercial or financial information to the government by safeguarding them from the competitive disadvantages that could result from disclosure. (2) The exemption covers two broad categories of information in federal agency records: (1) trade secrets; and (2) information that is (a) commercial or financial, and (b) obtained from a person, and (c) privileged or confidential.
It sounds like the FCC is not able to force companies to hand over this information, and in light of that it makes sense for them not to turn around and publish it though I still wish they would.
IMO the FCC should have the teeth to force companies to hand over this data, and should then publish it in the interest of transparency and providing answers to the public.
How much you wanna bet someone at the FCC has close friends at L3, Comcast, or even the entities involved in these deals? And somehow these secrets will find their way into their hands ...
Nah, a government agency would never share your valuable secrets with your competitors / enemies. Oh, wait.